WASHINGTON — The conflict that ended, for now, in a cease-fire
between Hamas and Israel seemed like the latest episode in a periodic showdown.
But there was a second, strategic agenda unfolding, according to U.S. and
Israeli officials: The exchange was something of a practice run for any future
armed confrontation with Iran, featuring improved rockets that can reach
Jerusalem and new anti-missile systems to counter them.

It is Iran, of course, that most preoccupies Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama. While disagreeing on tactics,
both have made it clear that time is short — probably measured in months — to
resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

And one key to their war-gaming has been cutting off Iran’s
ability to slip next-generation missiles into the Gaza Strip or Lebanon, where
they could be launched by Iran’s surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad,
during any crisis over sanctions or an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear
facilities.

Michael B. Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States and
a military historian, likened the insertion of Iranian missiles into Gaza to the
Cuban missile crisis.

“In the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. was not confronting Cuba,
but rather the Soviet Union,” Oren said Wednesday, as the cease-fire was
declared. “In Operation Pillar of Defense,” the name the Israel Defense Force
gave the Gaza operation, “Israel was not confronting Gaza, but Iran.”

It is an imprecise analogy. What the Soviet Union was slipping
into Cuba 50 years ago was a nuclear arsenal. In Gaza, the rockets and parts
that came from Iran were conventional, and, as the Israelis learned, still have
significant accuracy problems. But from one point of view, Israel was using the
Gaza battle to learn the capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad — the group
that has the closest ties to Iran — as well as to disrupt those links.

Indeed, the first strike in the eight-day missile war between
Hamas and Israel arguably took place nearly a month before the fighting began —
in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, as another mysterious explosion in the shadow
war with Iran.

A factory said to be producing light arms blew up in spectacular
fashion on Oct. 22, and within two days the Sudanese charged that it had been
hit by four Israeli warplanes that easily penetrated the country’s airspace.
Israelis will not talk about it. But Israeli and U.S. officials maintain that
Sudan has long been a prime transit point for smuggling Iranian Fajr rockets,
the kind Hamas launched against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over recent days.

The missile defense campaign that ensued over Israeli territory
is being described as the most intense yet in real combat anywhere — and as
having the potential to change warfare in the same way that novel applications
of air power in the Spanish Civil War shaped combat in the skies ever since.

Of course, a conflict with Iran, if a last ditch-effort to
restart negotiations fails, would look starkly different than what has just
occurred. Just weeks before the outbreak in Gaza, U.S., European and Persian
Gulf Arab allies were practicing at sea, working on clearing mines that might be
dropped in shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.

But in the Israeli and U.S. contingency planning, Israel would
face three tiers of threat in a conflict with Iran: the short-range missiles
that have been lobbed in this campaign, medium-range rockets fielded by
Hezbollah in Lebanon, and long-range missiles from Iran.

The last of those three could include the Shahab-3, the missile
Israeli and American intelligence believe could someday be fitted with a nuclear
weapon if Iran ever succeeded in developing one and — the harder task —
shrinking it to fit a warhead.

A U.S. Army air defense officer said the U.S. and Israeli
militaries were “absolutely learning a lot” from this campaign that may
contribute to a more effective “integration of all those tiered systems into a
layered approach.”

The goal, and the challenge, is to link short-, medium- and
long-range missile defense radar systems and interceptors against the different
types of threats that may emerge in the next conflict.

Even so, a historic battle of missile versus missile-defense has
played out in the skies over Israel, with Israeli officials saying their Iron
Dome system shot down 350 incoming rockets — 88 percent of all targets assigned
to the missile defense interceptors. Israeli officials declined to specify the
number of interceptors on hand to reload their missile-defense batteries.

Before the conflict began, Hamas was estimated to have amassed an
arsenal of 10,000 to 12,000 rockets. Israeli officials say their pre-emptive
strikes on Hamas rocket depots severely reduced the arsenal of missiles — both
those provided by Iran and some built in Gaza on a Syrian design.

But Israeli military officials stress that most of the
approximately 1,500 rockets fired by Hamas in this conflict were on trajectories
toward unpopulated areas. The radar tracking systems of Iron Dome are designed
to quickly discriminate between those that are hurtling toward a populated area
and strays not worth expending a costly interceptor to knock down.

“This discrimination is a very important part of all missile
defense systems,” said the U.S. Army expert, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to describe military assessments. “You want to ensure that you’re
going to engage a target missile that is heading toward a defended footprint,
like a populated area. This clearly has been a validation of the Iron Dome
system’s capability.”

The officer and other experts said that Iran also was certain to
be studying the apparent inability of the rockets it supplied to Hamas to
effectively strike targets in Israel, and could be expected to re-examine the
design of that weapon for improvements.

Israel fields five Iron Dome missile defense batteries, each
costing about $50 million, and wants to more than double the number of
batteries. In the past two fiscal years, the United States has given about $275
million in financial assistance to the Iron Dome program. Replacement
interceptors cost tens of thousands of dollars each.

Just three weeks ago, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited an Iron Dome site as a guest of his Israeli
counterpart during the largest U.S.-Israeli joint military exercise ever. For
the three-week exercise, called Austere Challenge, U.S. military personnel
operated Patriot land-based missile defense batteries on temporary deployment to
Israel as well as Aegis missile defense ships, which carry tracking radars and
interceptors.

Despite its performance during the current crisis, though, Iron
Dome has its limits.

It is specifically designed to counter only short-range rockets —
those capable of reaching targets at a distance of no more than 50 miles. Israel
is developing a medium-range missile defense system, called David’s Sling, which
was tested in computer simulations during the recent U.S.-Israeli exercise, and
has fielded a long-range system called Arrow.

“Nobody has really had to manage this kind of a battle before,”
said Jeffrey White, a defense fellow for the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy. “There are lots of rockets coming in all over half the country — and
there are all different kinds of rockets being fired.”